Readers' comments

Every decade there is a surge of interest in what happened 20 years ago in the arts. In the 70s there was a 50s revival, in the 80s there was a 60s revival, in the 90s there was a 70s revival, and in the 00s there was an 80s revival. Now in the teens, we get a 90s revival. It happens like clockwork. I've heard it being ascribed to those attaining adulthood trying to recreate their parent's world when their parents were their age. I guess this how we turn the past into history. I wonder what the last decade will be remembered for in 10 years' time.

Not to worry the clunkers are still being made. 1993 was a banner year for movies that didn't break even and the same holds true today. Just watch the Sundance film festival every year if you need reassurance

The problem that has always defaced art is art criticism. We may have gone through such as non-objective and minamilist, paintings facing the wall, and what-have-you. What we have not yet gone beyond is the need to try to slice and dice subject matter. Give me a book of reproductions anytime in place of the endless conceit of art dissection. Maybe Art will be truly mature when the application of the paint is more important than political implications or the artist's signature.

With everyone now a photographer, videographer and director of u-tube blurbs, is art really relevant anymore? There was a time when the masses were not exposed to many of the wonders of the world and had to rely on the interpretation of artists renderings for their enlightenment. Now so many people are busy immortalizing their own mundane lives that they really could not be "provoked" by any art, no matter how "edgy".
That is not to say that talented artists should not get their due. I just think that the art world is an incredibly narrow and otherworldly place these days and sorry, but I think I am yawning too.

Prospero's only question mark is quite adequate, though. Why precisely 1993? And the answer is honest: because it was 20 years ago. That is the only thing that seems to be interesting about the exercise, and it saves you from the trouble of trying to decide what was good and what was bad. A lot has been said about "postmodernism" for at least four decades, although the very term says it all: it is the way modernism so often tries to survive by repeating rather than reinventing itself. How many Duchamps epigons who proudly call themselves concept artists are still standing in line? They may yet be saved by a whole industry of gallerists, curators, risk capitalists, plus a number of politicians who are rarely interested in art but often prefer to play it safe.

"And the work that was produced and displayed had become more politicised and confrontational than in years past. Artists were not afraid to tackle controversial issues."
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You would need a drone to find an artist who is "afraid to tackle controversial issues." Most of them tackle nothing else. Their preferred method is shock -- "art" like the Piss Christ or the bizarre elephant dung Madonna that graced the walls of the Brooklyn Art Museum a decade ago.
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They're here, they're queer -- and we're not only used to it, we are bored to death by it. Nudity, phalluses, sacrilege, desecration of the flag ... yawn, yawn, double-yawn. Remember the naked woman who covered herself in chocolate? Karen Whatsherbutt? Where is she now -- working for the M & M candy company?
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Artists have tried to attract an audience for centuries by poking a stick in somebody or other's eye. A picture as quiet as Manet's "The Stonebreakers" was controversial 160 years ago and "Liberty at the Barricades" (Delacroix) was hidden away because it was so politically incendiary. This whole "Mommy, he said a dirty word" school of art is nothing new.
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What IS new is that it has run out of offensive things to portray. Now, a really unafraid, courageous art today would be anti-feminist, even misogynist, or unabashedly racist. (The New Yorker tried a bit of this with its wonderful Obamas/Terrorists cover of a few years ago.) There is an endless supply of political correctness to skewer -- gays who want to "marry," minorities on the dole, flaky academics, abortion-happy killer women . . . Gawd, but it is a long list!
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Will these "courageous artists" take any of these on as their new bete noirs? Fat chance! Today's artists, as has been true for generations, are utterly predictable in what they hate and blind to anything that does not fit their Babbitt-like aesthetics. Problem is, it has all been done. There is nothing left to attack or satirize.There are no provocations the rest of us have not already been provoked by.
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The sterility of so much art is not helped any by the knee-jerk critics -- especially those who educate the haute bourgeoisie on the pages of the NYT. Future generations will find it amazing that a bloated aesthetic ordeal like "Angels In America" could be hailed as a masterpiece.
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The whole conformist business was actually pretty well played-out with "Madame Bovary." Everything since has just been a series of footnotes, masquerading as art, for Flaubert's skewering of the middle-class and its values. Today, we throw in a penis or two and a few cuss words but, otherwise, it is just the Same Old, Same Old.
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It does not take "courage" to satirize what everybody agrees is loathsome. It DOES take courage to artistically savage those values that the bien-pensants of any period revere. Those revered values today are homosexuality, abortion, irreligion, people of color (a/ka/ "colored people), Native Americans (a/k/a "Indians"), promiscuity, feminists . . . the usual suspects.
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Good taste is not the pillar of art -- it is the enemy of art. For all the crucifixes immersed in urine, today' art is marked by a numbing good taste. It simply will not realistically portray the buffoonery that passes for solemn wisdom in today's PC America. So, in its strange way, TE has a point. Art today IS conformist, trivial and imitative. It is so saturated with Leftist ideology and so timid about challenging our tired verites ("A woman has a right to control her own body!" . . . "I am spiritual, not religious") that is little better than Casper Milquetoast at the easel.
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When an exhibit is denounced by the NYT, the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker Magazine for being "offensive," . . . "insensitive" . . . "hurtful" . . . "right-wing" . . . " and other such epithets then we will know that art has been reborn in America. Not because it has embraced the "right" political philosophy but because it has refused to be numbed by the current conventional wisdom. For, these publications -- predictable purveyors of the ordinary and mediocre -- will be as shocked as a Victorian lady grabbed by her ass in Charing Cross Station when a real rebel gives their Upper West Side cliches the finger.

Thank you, and Amen! You are correct in your observation that none have had the courage to satirize "homosexuality, abortion, irreligion, people of color (a/ka/ "colored people), Native Americans (a/k/a "Indians"), promiscuity, feminists . . . the usual suspects". Please don't forget about Islam. It is the holy grail of sensitivity and PC.

You must have read somebody else's post --- I said NONE of the things you quoted. (You do understand, don't you, that when you place words between " . . . . " it means a direct quote. I mean . . . you DO understand that, right? . . . right?"

Yes, thank you for pointing out my omission, It is rather fashionable to immerse a crucifix -- the most sacred object in Catholic iconology -- in urine and present it as art. Or, to portray the Virgin Mary with elephant dung. The ways in which Christianity is diminished is limited only by the febrile imagination of the artist.
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Want to be "original," "challenging," "shocking" and "eye opening?" How about, then, immersing a Koran in a beaker of piss and displaying it in some trendy Soho gallery? Islamists blew up a big part of NYC and murdered thousands -- and there is not an artist in Manhattan with the kahunas to use his talent to rip the looniness of modern Islam.
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THAT is the big failing of the NYC art scene -- the Kahuna Gap!

You say, "a really unafraid, courageous art today would be anti-feminist, even misogynist, or unabashedly racist.”
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Even when the so called artists are everything from your list, they more often than not fail to attract any interest.
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Look at one of the recent materials in Prospero blog – that on the Kehinde Wiley exhibition. He is black, and yes, he's obligatory queer, which I think hints a misogynist inclination, and he is also openly racist – paints only blacks, and is proud of it. But the post attracted just one comment so far, and it says that, “as far as the art itself is concerned, [Wiley's works] are rather mediocre, not to say kitschy”.
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And this is the common problem with those “artists”: they seek to provoke topically, but lack real talent and are lame artisans. Before evolving as an impressionist and starting to challenge conventions of the day, Manet had become skilled classic painter; same going for Picasso. Today's “revolutionaries” are too lazy: they think that it's sufficient to be “controversial”.
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Yawn indeed.

Good lord, what an enlightened comment. Art is terrible until it is racist and anti-feminist and homophobic. Any criticism of art from you is hollow and meaningless because you're obviously just irked the vast majority of artists don't share your hateful worldview. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia are the furthest things from original or profound art because society has been almost entirely saturated with these ideas from the beginning of civilization.

"It does not take "courage" to satirize what everybody agrees is loathsome." If everyone agrees homophobia is loathsome, why are gays still prohibited from marrying who they choose? If feminism is the status quo as you suggest, why do women make less for the same work? If racial equality reigns, why is a black conservative president called a dictator by his fellow conservatives?

Your only problem seems to be that art doesn't represent your right-wing values. I suggest you make some angry white-guy art to make yourself feel better, just don't expect anyone to take notice, because thankfully, while many people will agree with you, at least the art world has evolved past your 18th century perspective.

You don't know a first thing about art, or sarcasm, or, come to this, politics, though your post is a (clumsy) soap-box exercise in orthodox Left propaganda. It's wonder that Mr Andros deigned to reply to your rant at all, but I'm sure you'll miss his irony again.